The cruel con of post-trauma stress debriefing. Why it's done, and why it doesn't work.
Ben Hills
NOTHING in his 22 years as a railwayman had prepared Geoff Howell for his gruesome discovery when he was called out one night to secure the scene of a suicide in a railway cutting near the racecourse in Albury's northern suburbs.
By the light of his torch, the assistant station master picked out a severed hand, then a foot, then other mangled body parts. The woman who had thrown herself onto the tracks in front of the XPT Sydney-Melbourne express that summer night in 1992 had been chopped into 42 pieces.
It didn't help that a woman had earlier telephoned the Albury station to ask whether the XPT was on time. Nor that before he went to the cutting someone had told him that a garbage bin was needed at the scene, not an ambulance.
Japan's island of the damned. How a nation exiled its lepers
Ben Hills
THE white-painted arched span, like a miniature version of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is barely 100 metres long - but it took more than half a century to get it built. This highly symbolic bridge links Japan's mainland with a tiny, mountainous island called Naga-shima which juts out of the warm, grey waters of the Seto Inland Sea, surrounded by a cobweb of oyster-beds. Since 1930, when the first settlers came to Naga-shima, the only way to reach the island was by ferry or by swimming across the fast-flowing straits in which many people drowned. And that was the way most Japanese wanted it to stay, because Naga-shima is one of the country's most shameful secrets - an island of the damned, where people were exiled, never to return.
How negligence killed Japan's haemophiliacs.
Ben Hills
THE curtain goes up this afternoon on a black drama which the organisers hope will expose to the world the tragedy of Japan's hidden AIDS victims - the 1,800 people infected with the virus because the Government failed to stop the distribution of contaminated blood products. In the main hall of the futuristic new international convention centre in the port city of Yokohama, actors, activists and people with AIDS will act out the decade-long battle for recognition and compensation by Japan's hemophiliac community.
It's not part of the official program of the 10th international conference on AIDS - the annual extravaganza of AIDS researchers and activists - which is expected to attract 10,000 people from 140 countries.
Fake healers. Why Australia's $1 billion-a-year alternative medicine industry is ineffective and out of control.
Ben Hills investigates
HIS doctor was afraid only drastic chemotherapy could save the little boy's life. His parents were convinced the deadly cancer of the jaw could be cured by a gadget that delivers a minute electric current. Last January, four-year-old Liam Williams-Holloway was taken away from the hospital at Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island, where he was being treated, and placed under the care of Gerard and Dawn Uys, alternative health practitioners with no medical qualifications, who use a homemade device they call a Quantum Booster which they claim "boosts the immune system" and "kills the bacteria that cause cancer".
Appalled, the local health authority applied successfully to the courts to have the child declared a ward of the state - and provoked a passionate national debate about the merits of therapies rejected by medical science, and the "rights" of parents to choose their children's treatment, even when it may kill them.
Copper 7. The killer IUD that destroyed the lives of thousands of women
Ben Hills
TO SALLY Walker, doubled up in agony in the doctor's surgery, the words were as bad as a death sentence: "The gynaecologist told me he would have to operate to remove my (fallopian) tubes. I had f----d up my life and would never have babies. I just ran out of there in hysterics." That was in 1979 when Walker, then 22, thought she had her whole life ahead of her - a home, marriage, a family. Instead, at 40, she now lives alone in the Queensland resort town of Noosa, her fiance having abruptly called off the wedding when he learnt she could not have children.
AIDS - the great medical cover-up
Ben Hills
IT was some time in 1987 that Ichiro Tanaka began to feel unwell and was sent by his doctor for a check-up at a local hospital not far from Tokyo. Although he was only 23 and otherwise pretty fit, Ichiro was a hemophiliac - a hereditary condition effecting only males, in which the body does not produce the agent needed to make the blood clot.
In the old days, most hemophiliacs simply bled to death at an early age. Even with modern treatment, many suffer from painful deformities of the arms and legs and can wind up in a wheelchair.